(Written Dec 18, 2013)

The last few days have been crazy busy! We love Mexico… Other than the fact that it hates our apple products and neither my iPhone nor Sophie’s iPad will connect to wifi anywhere. Frustrating.

But anyway we’ve learned to cook some amazing food so far. Several kinds of mole, several different soups, several desserts, and several different meat/sauces. Today we even learned to cook rabbit! Crazy!

I’ll tell you more about the food later, but now let me tell you about our excursions…

So on Tuesday afternoon, Tonio (our taxi driver for the week) took us to Cacaxtla and Xochitelcatl. They’re ancient ruins left by the Olmec indians hundreds of years ago. Xochitelcatl has several remaining pyramids and Cacaxtla is the remains of an old palace (?) with several preserved color murals – particularly a large one depicting a battle scene. It was cool but so many stairs!!!

top of Pyramid of Flowers

 

top of Pyramid of Flowers

Yesterday (Wednesday) we went to the city Puebla. It’s the capital of the neighboring state, Puebla. Also where the famous battle of Cinco de Mayo took place. It’s often called the city of tiles because many of the buildings are decorated outside with colorful tiles. So crazy. It was a cool place but a bit more overwhelming than Tlaxcala. Just for a comparison, Tlaxcala has a population of around 38,000. But Puebla has around 4 million. So as you can guess, things were hoppin.

We saw the zocalo and several churches/cathedrals. As we sat near the zocalo trying to connect to the free wifi without success, a small peaceful protest marched past on la avenida de reforma. It was mostly innocent looking students and it looked like they were protesting oil companies of some kind. They had a catchy little chant that I forgot already.

We walked around several areas with famous architecture and shopping. The colors of the buildings were Crazy. It was also crazy how DECKED OUT everything is for Christmas. There are giant nativity scenes practically everywhere!

We stopped in a cute cafe and had cappuccino and fried plantains. Yum.

We walked down cinco de mayo street which is so crazy. Shopping. Venders. Loud Mexican music. Loud American music. People shouting deals on microphones. People dressed up like things. Balloons… A lot of balloons. Kids running. Bubbles. So many things happening at once. It was cool… We walked for a while, but it was just too much happening at once. But a fun experience.

We were ready to go a little earlier than we had told our taxi driver so we went and Sat on a ledge surrounding the outside Gate of the zocalo cathedral. I was feeling bored. But then I made a cute little friend… There was a young girl in a school uniform siting a few feet away from us and she kept looking over At us and smiling. (and also giggling when we took a picture of something). So I finally asked What her name was and She told Me Her name was Ashley and she was 13. I scooted closer and we started chatting. She was waiting for her older sister to get off work from Te store across The street from us… When my Spanish failed me (which was often), she woul try to think of the word in English. She did a pretty good job. That was cute. She told me She is studying English in school and hopes to visit the US someday. I encouraged her to keep studying hard. She was smart and asked a lot of interesting questions. We tlked for around 30 mins Until we had to go meet Tonio. So that was fun for me.